True. Also I was having a stab at how games are not $60 here. Some of these articles should be kept off the Australian website because they're totally irrelevant - just for the sake of content padding.

If you want to sell a game for $60, to the player it has to feel like $200

Nah - just has to be a good game! Thinking of a game as a product, instead of an original experience, will only give your company the reputation of a cheap fast-food restaurant. Originality always trumps copycatting. And selling cheap plastic crap with a game as "special edition" is nothing more than a happy-meal.

"Franchising is the practice of selling the right to use a firm's successful business model. For the franchisor, the franchise is an alternative to building "chain stores" to distribute goods that avoids the investments and liability of a chain. Essentially, and in terms of distribution, the franchisor is a supplier who allows an operator, or a franchisee, to use the supplier's trademark and distribute the supplier's goods." (Wiki)

This is not how great games are made. Franchising is how great games are gutted and destroyed.

My understanding is that Take-Two owns the rights to the Red Dead name and concept as the publisher, but Rockstar (San Diego?) are the developers. Take-Two licenses Rockstar to build the game and then splits the proceeds of the distribution with them. To Take-Two, Red Dead is a franchise, so it's technically correct.

Walking dead is a franchise but it still manages to be amazing in each separate media it's chosen to partake in. Just because something is being classified as a franchise doesn't mean the quality will diminish, especially if great developers are chosen to work on it, such as rockstar.